Master of Fine Arts: Studio Art Candidate Exhibition 2023

ENERGIES IN BEING:

The 2023 Inaugural Master of Fine Arts Exhibition

The backdrop for this inaugural Master of Fine Arts exhibition is a multifaceted and increasingly decolonized period in art’s history.  The exhibiting artists are the first CSUS graduates to be granted M.F.A. degrees, achieving acknowledged voice and standing in this liberated moment.

The drawings, paintings, and sculpture that comprise this exhibition demanded significant effort.  Deploying research, humility, and imaginative muscle, Jill Hannon, John Klaiber, Dafne Navarro, and Alberto Ruvalcaba have crafted their accomplished work through resolute grit. Countless hours making and unmaking their chosen forms have taught these artists how to move their efforts forward. They have learned how to meaningfully pay attention to themselves. Their sensory triggers no longer founder unrecognized and left for dead.

These triggers activate the artists’ primary world, the world as it is, not as it's expected or told to be. To maximize productive studio life, the artists have teased out material form and critical elements unique to each of them and put those components into play. The abiding character trait or lifeline defining a rich, authentically worthy, and creative life is knowing how to work on the work.  That is the mastery.  Not the work itself.

The works on display are framed by this unsettling and divisive moment. The works are not immutable, definitive, and absolute ideations.  They are energies in being – expressing, living. They are lives in which we involve ourselves as viewers. They are trembling beginnings bubbling into consciousness – fledgling starts in tune with the truth of our interconnected humanity and porous, mutable experience.

—By Julia Couzens, Curator

View the MFA 2023 Catalog